In summer 2024 the Educational Development and Technology (EDT) unit at the Minnesota State system office launched the Microsoft Copilot Evaluation Program, an initiative dedicated to planning for, developing, deploying, and evaluating the effectiveness of generative AI in instructional and non-instructional settings.
Throughout the 2024-25 academic year, dozens of innovative faculty, staff, and administrators from across Minnesota State collaborated using Copilot in experimental ways. The following presentations showcase some of their most insightful discoveries.
Everyone involved in this initiative hopes these insights might similarly inform your efforts to leverage Microsoft Copilot to advance teaching and learning and support student success whenever and wherever opportunity presents itself.
Copilot Evaluation Showcase Presentations:
- AI-Powered Administrative Tasks for Enhanced Productivity
- Spartan Bot / Brightspace Data AI Analytics
- Empowering Faculty Advisors through Development of a Virtual Advising Assistant
- Connecting Employees to Equity-Focused Professional Development
- OER Creation Using Generative AI
- Using Copilot for Instructional Design and Assessment
- Grounded Theory in the Cloud
- Designing Context Aware Instruction and Materials
Try Copilot
Try using Microsoft Copilot yourself*. Ensure you are using Copilot with commercial data protection by accessing the secure version. This requires being logged in with a Minnesota State account to the service.
How to login to Copilot using your Minnesota State account
- Navigate to https://copilot.microsoft.com/
- Select Sign in
- Log in with your StarID credentials
- Follow multi-factor authentication steps, if prompted
- You will see an commercial data protection seal in the top right corner.
Why Copilot?
Copilot is the preferred generative artificial intelligence (AI) platform for Minnesota State employees because when employees and students are logged into Microsoft with their StarID, our Microsoft contract provides some data protection. When logged in, Microsoft does not keep any of the data that is entered (e.g., prompts or data). Microsoft has no eyes-on access, and the chat data isn’t used to train the underlying large language models.
Employees must use caution and discretion when entering personally identifiable private data into Copilot. Deidentifying data and using aliases in spreadsheets are two options for leveraging Copilot while maintaining data privacy.
*Some uses of Microsoft Copilot require a license upgrade to M365 Copilot for $30 /mo. For more information about this license and its uses, contact your campus IT department.
Contact
For more information about the Copilot Evaluation Program, contact Stephen Kelly, NextGen Student Companion Project and AI Lead.
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